Jennifer comes home

So it has been a ridiculous amount of time since my last post but that was primarily because we were waiting for Jennifer to actually arrive here in the US. So with a minor paperwork scramble out of the way, she got off a plane about four days back and was quickly collected and driven home.

Sam and Jennifer

We decided to have her escorted home as taking another week off to head back to Kazakhstan was going to be very difficult. In the end it all seems to have worked out.

More pictures of Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan

There aren’t a lot of pictures of the town of Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan on the Internet from what I can find so here are a bunch more that we’ve taken as we travel about the town. They will give you a flavor for the town and what it looks like.

Art Gallery in Petropavlovsk

We had a chance a few days back to visit the local art gallery. It is located in a 100 year old building in the traditional Kazakhstan style that used to be the home of a wealthy merchant. It was renovated a number of years back and turned into an art gallery.

It is small but has a pretty varied collection of more traditional art as well as modern interpretations from local artists. We got a tour from the Director as we were the only people there. It is worth the hour or so it takes to walk through.

Are here it is on Google Maps:

Some pictures of Jennifer

It has been awhile since I posted some pictures of Jennifer so here they are. Bonding period is officially done and the court date is this coming Tuesday.

The Kazakhstan Museum in Petropavlovsk

Petropavlovsk has its own museum just off the downtown area and we finally got a chance to visit it today. Our previous attempts had been thwarted by power outages (which are common here).

The museum is small but has a really nice collection of original Kazak artwork, weapons, armor and dress. It is definitely worth the hour or so that it takes to get through it and is especially educational if you bring a translator to read all the information that goes along with the exhibits as everything is in Russian and Kazak…neither of which I can read.

Here are some pictures from inside and outside the museum:

And here is where it is located. What is interesting is that the Google satellite shot is obviously a couple of years old as it shows the ruin and not the fully renovated building (started in 2005 and finished in August of 2008).

The Pizza Place in Petropavlovsk

We stumbled upon a new restaurant a week or so back. Going by the name “The Pizza Place” as well as “The New Turkish Restaurant” it is focused on kids and has a decent collection of Turkish food like kabobs as well as a pretty extensive collection of western food like pizza, hamburgers and chicken wings. It is a popular place for dinner for couples in the middle of adoptions.

The food is sort of what you would expect from a place like this – good but not great – and like most of the restaurants in Kazakhstan that try to do western fare they don’t quite get it right. But it is a nice change from the food at the hotel. The breaded hamburgers were a special surprise.

Of course the giant blow-up playground was the only thing Sam was interested in although we did manage to get a bit of food in her between rounds. The meatballs were particularity popular.

Some shots of the place:

Meet Jennifer Darya

So after much debate we finally decided on a name. Jennifer Darya is the one that won out even though it wasn’t even on the list at the beginning. Her name will officially change after our court appearance. At that point they will apply to get her Kazakhstan passport in her new name.

Some more pictures:

This Borat thing might have some truth behind it

When the movie Borat first came out I pretty much assumed that it was based on a made up version of Kazakhstan. Even though I’ve never actually seen the movie, even the trailer was so over the top that there was no way that it was real.

I spotted this poster on a shop today here in Petropavlovsk so now I’m not so sure…(in all seriousness I haven’t seen a single person wearing one of these since we arrived…so I doubt the shop has a lot of customers for them)

The Real Kazakhstan

The Theoretical Kazakhstan aka Borat

Pictures of Petropavlovsk

I haven’t posted a lot of pictures of the city of Petropavlovsk so far so here are a bunch to catch me up.

The one thing that might not come out in the photos is how dirty the streets are – there is mud everywhere. It is no wonder the locals always wear black. Anything else and you’d be changing clothes multiple times a day. I was pretty amazed about the mud actually. Even where there are proper curbs and sidewalks there is nothing growing in the boulevard except some weeds or random grass. For the most part it is just dirt – or when it rains mud.

They do have street sweepers out all over the place right now sweeping up the dirt. It really doesn’t help….

Found the wood playground…sort of

We had heard rumor of a wooden playground towards the end of Constitution Street (the pedestrian walk down the middle of the city) so this morning we set off to find it. There are a lot of playgrounds in Petro but they tend towards rusted metal installed over mud so we’ve been avoiding them so far and sticking to the indoor variety. This time we were hoping for a more modern style playground for Sam to play on.

We did end up finding it way down at the end of the street (about a 30 minute walk from the hotel – GPS: 54.873641,69.123852) but unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be anything that Sam could really play on. As you can see from the pictures it wasn’t exactly what you could call safe. So we are still searching for a decent playground.